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Re new atheists disgust with Christ's atonement as a barbarous act by God

...it ignores the virtue ethic dimension of justice but treats justice as vengeance.  The criminal needs to make amends: so do we.  And we do in a sense, by not only accepting but also identifying with Christ's act of doing so.  Christ's story becomes ours. 
...it treats one (key) aspect as if it were the whole.  Part of what Christ did on the cross was respond in a loving way to negative things like pain and injustice.  One way to look at our redemption is to identify with Him in this response.  And I mean "identify"!  And the joy in the Christian response is, in this life, a radiation of the Resurrection upon the world
...it displays the ugliness of sin, the beauty of forgiveness, the tragedy of death, the glorious triumph of grace: no Shakespearean play will ever match this drama.
...there's more to this, but it escapes my mind at the moment.

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